I Live Among You

  I Live Among You

  Copyright 2017 Duncan McGeary

  Edited by Lara Milton

  Cover by Andrew Hunt

  Chapter 1

  When the devil came a-calling, I was too busy to notice.

  I was stalking Hermes Gutierrez, though “stalking” might be too grand a word for what I was doing. He was clueless that anyone was tailing him, and I’d stopped taking precautions and was following him as closely as I pleased.

  He was an ambitious man who had started his landscaping business with only himself and a borrowed lawnmower. Now he had three crews. He spent most of his time driving around fixing their mistakes.

  Why Hermes Gutierrez? No reason, and that’s the point.

  I had stopped trying to figure out why a long time ago. There was a sickness inside me that had no explanation. The impulse was me, and I was the impulse. Simple as that.

  I’d seen Gutierrez drive by one day in his big green pickup and something inside me had said, He’s the one. That’s all there was to it. More than that, I didn’t want to know.

  I just needed to find the opening, that moment when he would be perfectly alone. I’d identified several places and times that were suitable. It is always nice when my prey is predictable. I’d already decided that today was the day to strike when I felt a sensation that I was being observed.

  I didn’t react. I abandoned Gutierrez and drove around randomly, watching for signals that anyone was watching. Nothing. And yet, after many close calls over the years, I’d come to depend on my instincts. Something was off.

  I noticed a tall, skeletal man on a street corner as I drove by. He was staring straight at me with narrowed eyes, slits of black with two shining red lights in them. It gave me the shivers. I stepped on the gas pedal and sped away.

  But then, a good half mile away, there he was again on another street corner. I slowed down as I passed, and he raised a skeletal hand, too big and too spidery for a human’s.

  This wasn’t the first time I’d noticed such weird things out of the corner of my eye, moments before or after I looked. I had always felt I had my own stalker, even more skilled than myself, who would someday make his presence known.

  I parked around the corner and sprinted around the block, intending to come up behind the man. We’d see what we would see—but it was possible that Gutierrez would get a reprieve and my hunger to take a life would be satiated by someone else.

  He wasn’t there. It was a barren street, with only office buildings nearby. There were few places he could hide. But then, for someone who could move half a mile in mere moments, that probably wasn’t a problem.

  I drove home, distracted, abandoning my plans for Gutierrez.

  The next day, the hunger returned, stronger than ever, and I knew it would only get worse until I got release.

  Gutierrez was waiting, sitting on the tail of his pickup, looking angry. It was the third time that his number-two crew had been late to this site, a landscaping job for a new house. It was in a newer housing development, without any full-time residents. I pulled up behind him and sat there for a moment, trying to sense if I was being watched, but I was pretty sure I was alone.

  I got out and walked toward Gutierrez, who jumped off the tail of the pickup to meet me. He was smiling, probably thinking I was the owner of the house, who had hired him by phone.

  I took his outstretched hand and jerked him off his feet. I slammed his head into the pickup. He bounced off of it and then fell backward onto the ground. He was still groaning, so I kicked him as hard as I could in the temple, and he grew still. I reached down and ripped the American flag pin from his shirt. A little souvenir. In the not-too-distant future, I would take that pin out of my pocket and stroke it and remember this moment.

  I unstrapped the huge riding lawnmower from the truck’s bed, wheeled it to tailgate, and toppled it over on top of the unmoving man. It crashed onto Gutierrez’s head, which would hide any of the previous wounds. Blood splattered everywhere, but since I was standing in the bed of the pickup, most of it missed me.

  I hopped over the side, got in my car, and drove away. I felt the rush of completion, the relaxing of the impulse, a satisfaction that was different from sex but was still a climax, a great relief.

  I was free to live life as a normal man again. The kill would keep me going for a couple of weeks. I used to last years between kills, but lately I seemed to need it more often.

  Probably because of my fucking job.

  Truth was, I was really sick of spying on middle-aged philanderers of both sexes. Tired of their sordid little lovemaking. It was all pretty pathetic. But it gave me an excuse to snoop around, and more than once, when I’d been stopped, showing my PI license had been enough to get me out of trouble. I wore a black suit these days and had a nicely trimmed goatee. I looked like a good citizen.

  The cheaters were the ones I really wanted to steal from, not some poor innocent gardener. But Rule Number One was never kill anyone you know.

  I stopped at my wall calendar by the door and put a black mark on it. Several years ago, I’d realized that I’d lost track. So I’d taken to marking my scores. Someday I might even go back through my pile of calendars and make a full accounting.

  I always laughed when I read about other serial killers. To me, the fact that they actually remembered all the people they’d killed signaled that they were amateurs.

  My office was on the third floor of a seedy office building, and my office was probably the seediest of all. I didn’t care for luxuries, and I was a lazy bastard. So I didn’t mind the dust balls and the spider webs in the corners. It just added to the noir feel of my profession. All I was missing was the sexy secretary.

  I conducted most of my business over the phone anyway. It was rare that a client showed up unannounced at my door.

  He didn’t knock, just walked in. It was the spectral man on the corner.

  I stood up, all my senses tingling. The temperature in the room seemed to drop twenty degrees, though I wasn’t sure if it was a physical or mental chill. I almost reached for my gun, but the man held out his hand soothingly.

  “Don’t worry, Mr. Grandy,” he said. “I’m not here to harm you.”

  Grandy. It was my real name, but I hadn’t used it in twenty years. I put my hand on the grip of my gun.

  He was tall and slender and vibrating with energy. A shock of silver hair covered his head, though his face looked young—or rather, ageless, without a wrinkle or spot to be seen. His eyes were brown, but they seemed to have a glint of red. His hands weren’t right—they were off, somehow. The fingers were too long, the palms too wide. That’s what gave him away.

  “You aren’t human,” I said.

  “And neither are you,” he answered. “I mean, you don’t know it yet, but you are something other.”

  Actually, I did know. Or at least I suspected it.

  “Which is why I’m here,” the stranger continued. “I want to hire you.”

  I motioned to the chair in the corner, and my visitor reached out with his overlong arms and dragged it in front of the desk and elegantly sat down. He was wearing a tailored suit, which somewhat hid the oddities of his body, but his arms and legs and his neck were too long. His head was too big, and his trunk was a noodle.

  For some reason, I couldn’t look at him for long. My eyes kept drifting away.

  “You see me better than most,” the man said. “Which only confirms what I said. Most people can’t see me at all, or if they do, I’m in the corner of their eye, a stranger in passing.”

  “So you’re…what, an alien?” I asked. I could barely believe how calm I was, how willing I was to believe in something “other.”

  “No, Mr. Grandy, I’m a devil.” r />
  “The devil…”

  I couldn’t help but laugh even as I sensed it was true. Maybe I should have been more surprised, but somehow I’d always known there were other supernatural forces at work in the world. I took it all in without a qualm. The only time I ever got excited was when I made a kill—which was probably why I killed in the first place.

  Not even the devil could throw me.

  “Well, maybe not the devil,” he said, “but a devil…a demon, if you will, fairly high ranked, if I may say so myself, but certainly not the devil, whom I’ve only met once, when I got my commendation for…well, better you not know that. My name is Lictor.”

  “So what do you want from me, Mr. Lictor?” I asked. “You would seem to have powers I don’t possess. What do you need me for?”

  “True, but there are rules. I can only get involved if I’m invited. But this situation is so serious that I’m resorting to a small loophole. Though I can’t be involved personally, there is nothing to keep me from hiring someone else to do the job.”

  “Five hundred dollars an hour,” I said. I wasn’t going to take the job, whatever it was, but I was testing him. The most I’d ever gotten was two hundred dollars an hour, and that was only because a bigger agency had used hiring me as an excuse for more billable hours.

  “A thousand, a million, whatever you want,” my not-so-little demon said. “It doesn’t matter. I know you are already a wealthy man, Mr. Grandy. You like to think you kill for pure pleasure, but isn’t it strange how often your victims are rich?”

  “How do you know what I think?”

  Lictor grinned. “I can read your thoughts, how else? I know everything there is to know about you, Mr. Grandy. And I do mean everything.”

  I sat down at that. All my years of thinking I was unique, an alpha predator, unseen, unknown, uncaught…all of it seemed small and pathetic now. There was true Evil—with a capital E—in the world. I mean, I already knew that, but before, I had thought I was its embodiment.

  How cheap that there should be literal evil.

  “Oh, there’s evil and then there’s Evil,” Lictor said, as if reading my mind. No, wait. He is reading my mind. “Believe me, we value your contributions. They mean so much more when we aren’t the instigators. We’ve been watching you for a good long while. I think you’re number four or five in current killers.”

  “What? I don’t believe you.”

  “Oh, you thought you were number one?” Lictor chuckled. “You won’t live long enough to catch up to Comrade Alexei Andropov, even if you killed every day for the rest of your life. Of course, you don’t have the kind of access to victims that he has. In fact, everyone ahead of you on the list lives in places much less civilized, so believe me, we value your service.”

  “Why am I not human?” I asked. “I mean, I know I’m special, but I don’t seem physically different.”

  “You have a recessive gene, Mr. Grandy. Very rare. It makes you something…well, let’s just say it makes you something else. For instance, if you were normal, you’d be freezing right now. But you have automatically adjusted your body temperature and you don’t feel the cold.”

  Now that he mentioned it, I realized I’d been seeing my breath puffing out for several minutes, yet I felt toasty warm.

  “There is a downside to your difference,” Lictor continued. “You’ll never be able to reproduce with other humans, and your chance of finding a female with the same gene is nearly nonexistent.” His eyes burned red for a moment, and I realized he was thinking. “Indeed, there are only three such females currently living, and one is too old, and a second is too young for breeding.”

  “Very well, I accept the job.”

  “Without knowing what it is?” Lictor said, smiling.

  “On one condition,” I said. “I want to meet the girl with the recessive gene.”

  Lictor was silent for a moment. “I must confer,” he muttered. His eyes glowed a bright red for several moments, and then he smiled. “Very well. We think that would be an interesting test. I might mean the end of the human species, but maybe it’s time for another experiment.”

  I hesitated to bring it up, but I couldn’t help it. Curiosity got the better of me. “Doesn’t the other side have something to say about that?”

  “The other side?”

  “You know…angels and…stuff.”

  Lictor roared with laughter, putting his long fingers across his belly as if to contain his mirth. It was a pleasant sound, even if it did come from a demon. “We haven’t heard from the other side in millennia. Busy elsewhere, I suppose. Or maybe they’re gone, I don’t know. No, Mr. Grandy, you needn’t worry about that.”

  That wasn’t good enough. “Then why haven’t you won, Lictor? If you have no opposition?”

  His laughter faded instantly. “Who’s to say we haven’t?” he grumbled.

  “Well, I admit things are pretty bad,” I said. “But there is still kindness in the world. I seem to be attuned to it. I can be walking down the street, and damned if I don’t notice someone opening the door for someone else, someone returning a dropped wallet, someone waving someone else across the sidewalk. Not to mention, well, I see people in love, and I see generosity and kindness and…”

  “Stop, stop,” Lictor groaned. “You’re killing me.”

  “Well?” I demanded. “Why haven’t you won?”

  “As I mentioned, we can only act when we are invited. And even the stupidest, most venal humans are leery of doing that. We usually catch them off guard, when they’re young or desperate. But really, we’re winning anyway. I admit, it’s taking longer than I thought it would. There is a stubborn streak in these humans that is hard to eradicate. You should know, you prey on it too.”

  For the first time in years, I felt a sense of guilt. To be honest, until that moment I didn’t think I was capable of shame or guilt. But knowing that I wasn’t the most evil thing in the world was a humbling experience, and it somehow diminished everything I’d done.

  “So if I accept your job,” I said, “does that mean I’ve consigned my soul to you?”

  Lictor looked genuinely puzzled. “You believe you have a soul, after everything you’ve done? Or that if you had a soul, it had any chance of going somewhere else?” He shook his head in apparent amazement. “How quaint.”

  “Then I what reason would I have to help you?” I asked bluntly.

  “Because I can make your life a living hell before you get to hell, and when you get to hell, I can make it double.” He stared at me, then shrugged. “Or I can give you special dispensation. It won’t be pleasant, but believe me, it will beat the alternative.”

  Chapter 2

  “What do you want from me?” I asked.

  Lictor cocked his head to one side as if listening to instructions. “I’m authorized to provide you with what you need to succeed,” he said, finally. “We will pay you, of course, but the real reward is helping you become who you truly are.”

  “You’re not answering my question,” I pointed out.

  “Well, first I want to reassure you that you will have a good chance at success,” Lictor said. “For that purpose, we will help unlock your potential. Perhaps these sublimated powers might have emerged under conditions of stress sometime in the future—though that hasn’t happened to anyone else with your peculiar condition—but we believe that we aren’t breaking any rules when we simply help you become who you really are.”

  “You keeping saying rules,” I said. “Which means that someone is enforcing the rules. But you said…”

  “Yes, yes,” Lictor said, waving one of his freaky-looking hands. “You needn’t concern yourself with that.”

  Ah, a weakness at last. Something the demon didn’t want me to know. So there was a chance I could come out of this. If the forces of darkness were all-powerful, what was the point? Let them take me now, since it appeared I wasn’t anything special.

  But obviously, there was a higher power…somewhere. Someone
or something that enforced “rules.” Someone or something I could appeal to when this was all over.

  “You have certain innate abilities, which I can help you call forth,” Lictor said.

  “So you’re going to come with me?” I asked. “You’re going to help?”

  “Not help, but observe,” Lictor corrected me. “And it won’t be me who accompanies you, but one of my…confederates, let us say.”

  “So what’s the job?” I asked again.

  “We wish you to confront a danger to this dimension.”

  “Huh?”

  “You and I and humans and…the other side…we all inhabit this dimension, but there are other dimensions where none of us have any power or influence. Unfortunately, the opposite is not true. Apparently, the inhabitants of some of those dimensions can enter our world, given help. There are dangers to this world that threaten all of us. The normal rules don’t apply.”

  “So take care of it yourself,” I said. “If these…entities are outside the rules.”

  “We will,” Lictor said, “once they manifest—but by then it may be too late. We need to keep them from entering in force. They have begun to explore our world already, but they can only do so with the help of humans. And we are not allowed to interfere with humans unless we are invited. That’s where you come in.”

  I took out my laptop and opened a new file.

  “Who are they?” I asked.

  Lictor hesitated. “Well…we don’t know, do we? But if we must call them something, we might as well name them the Old Gods after the author H.P. Lovecraft’s inventions. These creatures have quite similar characteristics.”

  “Lovecraft?” I wrote the name down. It seemed vaguely familiar.

  “An author of weird tales in the 1920s and ’30s. He created an entire mythos of strange and fantastical lands and creatures…though it seems more and more probable he didn’t create these things out of his imagination at all. Likely he just witnessed some scouting expeditions from wherever it is they come from.”